Blueprints for St. Louis

It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Ida’s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching, when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they’d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt?

You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer, or the prior spring, and, well, didn’t the seasons and the years just dog-pile one another when you tried to solve math like that? Ida wasn’t particularly concerned, because, whatever, there was a clarity to the coldness, right? And screw Roy if he’d fallen down a brightly colored porn hole, pummelling himself to images of animated youngsters slithering around in grownup crotch gear in a cartoon fairyland. Browser histories weren’t her favorite literary genre, but she knew how to read them. Anyway, if her husband’s use-case viability on the marital graph had taken a nosedive, then so, too, had her own burden. She had her friends, she had her work on the memorial, and she had the showerhead. When she and Roy first got married, whenever ago, Ida’s mother had told her that if people don’t visit you don’t have to host. Period, full stop. And even though Ida’s take on this advice now was off-label, it applied just fine to her touchless union. The body unloved, the body unhandled and unseen. The body as a ghost-in-training for whatever soiled world came next. Anyway, wasn’t left-alone the best place to wind up?

Maybe old age and the cold blue death of the groin would solve that. Maybe Ida would inherit a sweet and useless Roy, post-pornography, sitting politely behind a drool cloth, swaddled in food-stained sweaters. She’d feed him until he cooed and maybe sometimes they would run out of gruel and she would watch his hunger grow, watch his eyes turn small and sad. Would it be so terrible? The sexual urge would be merely an embarrassing spasm of the past. They’d been friends once, before they’d got into designing memorials for unspeakable catastrophes. Intense and respectful partners in their architectural firm. Mutually committed cattle prodders of each other’s darker, stranger brains, torturing out each other’s best ideas, before the chemical repulsion and bed-death had struck. Maybe by old age they’d return to form, be ideal dance partners again, if only they could stay alive long enough.

The problem was today and tomorrow and the next fucking huge bunch of days, the entirety of their middle age, really, which shouldn’t be just a rotten footbridge you had to navigate, with a creepy old troll beating off underneath it. Roy was technically handsome, but he preened, and he moped, and he fished for so many compliments that Ida was fished out, empty, unable to smear any favorable speech over his prim, needy body. For some time he’d been taking himself to the gym with more ambition and lust than he showed for their collaborative design work, and he was all cut up now, a strange, Photoshopped musculature slipped over his bones like a bronzed wetsuit. She should have wanted to handle the new body he’d built, use it to snuff out her baser urges, not that Roy offered it to her, but she asked that he keep it covered. In loose-fitting layers, please. It stank of his not-so-hidden effort to attract a mammal outside the home. To sport with it and lick its fur, no doubt. Plus, she had tolerated her husband better when he wasn’t such a vain custodian of the ephemeral—one mustn’t fawn over that which will rot, someone important must have once said.

What consumed them both right now was the situation in St. Louis, for which their firm had been ceremoniously commissioned to design the memorial. Months after the bombing, the city was still digging out. Thirty dead souls, the news had said when it happened. But everyone knew that number wasn’t real. It was low by a couple of decimal points. For days, the toll did not breach a hundred, which seemed impossible. Where did these cautious estimates come from? Maybe from actual bodies. Maybe this meant that the other, more plentiful dead were simply nowhere to be found, in the same way that wind can’t be found. What you did was you factored in the missing, and privately you did not call them missing. Thousands of people had not suddenly left their homes that morning and vanished into the mountains. When you watched the footage of the bombing, the dark slab of glass folding over itself like a blanket, then erupting into a pale-brown flower of smoke, and you calculated the typical occupancy, not just of the office tower but of the surrounding plaza, with its underground restaurants and shops, its perimeter of cafés, along with the time of day, the number thirty was a violent piece of wishful thinking, heavy, heavy, heavy on the wish.

“10k+,” Roy had texted Ida from wherever he was the day it happened.

He wasn’t wrong. It emerged that explosives had been buried in the foundation of the tower when it was being built, two years before, by some slithering motherfuckers on the construction crew. Stashed down there the night before the footings were poured, apparently, and then triggered when the building was finished and stuffed to the gills with people. In burning daylight, a time of high commerce, maximum human traffic. Not a government building, so far as anyone knew. Just as dense a cluster of people as any in the Midwest, excepting one or two zones in downtown Chicago. And so, and so. They had the perpetrators on video, brutes in hard hats. Except that they were skinny and they laughed a lot and were often seen hugging one another. Four of them had walked off the job on the same day, before the building had even started to rise up out of the concrete. How that very act—quitting in a group, never to be seen again—hadn’t been some sort of security trigger was beyond Ida, but whatever, hindsight was a foul drug. And now everyone was asking, Who were these men and where had they gone? Oh, please, Ida thought, whenever this particular investigation blistered onto the screen. The St. Louis Four. The villains of Missouri. Can we please not believe that finding these men will matter at all? Please?

“Terrorism” wasn’t really the term anymore. Ida found that it soured in her mouth, like a German word for some obscure feeling. “Tax” seemed to be a finer way to put it. A tax had been levied in St. Louis. In New Orleans last year, in Tucson three years back. Et cetera. A tax on comfort, safety. A price paid for being alive, for waking up. Occasionally, the tax collector came. Not just occasionally. Quite a lot these days. You could run out of breath trying to name all the cities that had been hit in this country. The collector came, and people were subtracted from space. Buildings withered into rubble. One’s imagination needed to frequently dilate in order to accommodate the ways and means, and otherwise smart men and women were busy with their scuffed crystal balls trying to figure out what was next, and how, and how. As if this forecasting ever . . . oh, forget it. Soon you knew not to be surprised, and this awareness was chilling. A low hum could be heard during the day, the night. You walked in a space that might not really be there. There was no longer anything proverbial when it came to danger, nothing to invent, no more fiction of dark days to come. The dark days were here. They were now.

In light of this, it was somehow Roy and Ida’s calling to honor the site with a memorial. Or to try to, to actually compete for this kind of work, squirming through town halls and public debates, spinning a story about their vision, which was only ever a humble story to the effect that nothing anyone did could ever be enough. Their track record so far wasn’t the worst, which was not much of a feel-good fact for either of them, even if a sort of undertaker’s renown had attached itself to their firm over the years. They made their mark by designing large public graves where people could gather and also where maybe really cool food trucks would park. There was money for this, and money for this, and money for this. Hooray. Except that now Ida found it hard to view any other kind of design commission—for a vanilla-white office building in their own downtown Chicago, for example—as anything other than a future headstone, a kind of sarcophagus that would briefly house living, glistening people before they were lowered into the earth or scattered out over the lake in a burst of powder. If you were an architect, you designed tombs, for before or for after. What was the difference?

Ida kept a map pinned above her desk because she thought she might see something in the pattern of fallen cities: a story. Detectives did this to solve crimes. She thought it might tell her what to build. But sometimes, when she and Roy marvelled at it, it seemed to them like a coloring book that hadn’t been filled in all the way yet. Sure, there were some spaces still to shade, whole cities left strangely untouched, but not that many. And there was always tomorrow.

St. Louis should not have been high on the list of targets, maybe not on the list at all, but that seemed to be the point these days, in the year of our sorrow. The years and years of it. A new and unspoken list of vulnerable sites had emerged: sweet zones, soft parts of the American body that could be knifed open and spilled out by the most skilled urban surgeons the world had ever seen.

Six months after the St. Louis attack, Roy and Ida had been invited to submit a proposal, and they’d gone through their usual tangled brainstorm, smoothing over the sharper ideas of their junior staff, whiteboarding a design that would appear sufficiently nonthreatening in the space, a kind of tranquillizing maze of low walls and open rooms for visitors to throw themselves around in and grieve. Roy called it the sanatorium aesthetic, and he wasn’t that far off.

One day, as the deadline loomed, they walked along the great lake, which was flat and black, even as the wind pounded them. They started, brokenly, to drill down toward what they might possibly build, what it would look and sound like, what sort of feelings they were trying to create. Usually, you had to dance around the stakeholders to determine the emotional bolus of a work, as they called it. But the stakeholders for this project? Only the entire population of the United States of America.

Ida didn’t want to aim high, she started to say, so much as she wanted to aim into a kind of hidden space. “I don’t want you to be able to picture it when I talk about it,” she told Roy. “You shouldn’t be able to photograph it. I mean, like the lake—you wouldn’t even want to photograph it. You shouldn’t be able to draw it. That’s my problem.”

“Gosh, that really is your problem.”

“I don’t know,” she said, gesturing at the sky, which was not particularly pretty or interesting that afternoon. It was not the kind of sky you would ever take a picture of, and Ida found that compelling. “Is there a better memorial than that? The sky?”

“Isn’t the sky just a gravestone,” Ida said, “and we’re all buried under it?”

“Ooh. Not bad. I see what you did there. But, no offense, why are we talking about this?”

Ida had to do this, to think too grandly or wrongly in order to maybe get closer to what was called for. “It’s almost like,” she said, “what if you had to design the afterlife exactly as you really think it is. Not something aspirational, some bullshit heaven. Not a religious fantasy. The truth.”

He didn’t care about any of this right now, Ida could tell, and maybe he had a point.

“I assume you don’t believe in, well, anything?” When she thought back to their first conversations in grad school, prickly and intense and flirty, she wasn’t sure if this had ever come up. Was that possible? She had adored and then admired him for so long, and now she knew him inside and out, and she felt she understood him to the core. Was it possible that he harbored private, unknowable ideas about his own death and whatever might happen after?

“O.K., let’s say that you want to make an experiential piece that invites people to inhabit that sort of emptiness. How do you do it?”

Roy looked up. “How? As in, how do certain Midwestern architects make a credible design of the one true afterlife? Seriously. Are we really having this conversation?”

He seemed to give it some thought, but there was something unnatural about how theatrically he pondered, as if he already knew what he was going to say but was pausing for effect. This was the Roy who spouted off on arts panels, who was about to spray fine, floral bullshit across the auditorium.

“I like the question,” he said. “It reveals something important, and I see where you’re going with it. If you make a space like that, you connect visitors with the dead, which is a pretty big artistic win.”

Ida winced. Big artistic win.

“In the end,” Roy said, “the question falls apart because the answer is just too easy. It’s too obvious. Why not just kill them? Then they’ll get the real and true afterlife. Who needs to simulate anything when you have the real thing? Someone already designed death. We were beaten to the punch.”

He smiled at her and very nearly seemed to be gloating.

O.K. God. “This isn’t a battle of wits, Roy,” she said. But then she wondered if maybe it was, and that was what was wrong. Partly. When one person thinks it’s not a contest.

They stopped and looked out over the lake.

“I was hoping we could produce work without a body count, though. A modest goal.”

“Oh, you mean because too many people have died already?”

“Jesus, Roy.”

“None of this works if I can’t be honest with you,” he whispered.

“There are other reasons that none of this works,” she said.

“Ida, I was joking. I was trying to be funny.”

But why? she didn’t say. To what end? And aren’t we supposed to be doing this together?

“I don’t know, Roy. Can we think about a tranquil space, not heavy on physical material, not oppressive and thick, that isn’t just a New Age wank space with wind chimes and shit? Can we do that?”

Roy admitted that this sounded good, that this was something they could shoot for.

The memorial planning went on for weeks. They mocked up models, strung wire through their studio and tuned it to different tensions, just to explore suspended structures that might allow for a subterranean feeling without actually trapping people underground. Haunt the viewers but don’t stress them out. And almost every day, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the very early morning, they walked the city together, looking at space and light, growing ever more certain of what they didn’t want the memorial to be.

Fucking Roy was kind and gracious, suppressing his own ideas while generously fielding every wild and unbuildable notion from Ida, perhaps knowing that her interest in reality, in plausibility and practicality, could be low. She couldn’t help herself; she went on and on about the mourners. They were still here, she was saying, in this world, but they were pulled elsewhere, to the place where their loved ones were. Wherever that was. Survivors lived in both places. That was what she wanted this monument to say. She wanted it to feel like that, the tension between two worlds.

For a little while they walked arm in arm, and for a little while things seemed different. But what had they really agreed on? Ida wondered. What were they even talking about?

Roy must have known the whole time that there was no building design behind this idea, that time was really fucking upon them and something had to take shape on paper. The office was waiting to pounce at their go-ahead, and he needed to ring the bell. Ida realized that he’d been slowly laying the groundwork for his own plan, which maybe he’d had in his head all along. It was simple and obvious and probably inevitable, and he told it to her in pieces, over a period of a few days. It was to be a hollow square glass museum, low on the plaza, with a center that could not be accessed or even seen. A black void where the building and the shops had been. Right. There were details and details and details, and a narrative had to be written, because, well, yeah, but this was a square with a hole in it. To Ida, it resonated just a wee bit of other memorials, built and unbuilt, which was probably shrewd on Roy’s part. He wanted their work to get made, whereas sometimes she suffered the classic ambivalence of an architect. Maybe her designs had a kill switch on purpose.

They went home and had dinner, and that night Roy was already calling it a lock, getting renderings done, and speccing out site maps and plans and all the shit that had to happen even to get this thing ready for the review board.

There was really just one more thing to deal with for now, and they had both been dreading it. They had to finally sit down and look at bids from the pharmaceuticals, which were fighting their way onto the proposal, vying to be the providers of the chemical component that every memorial these days was more or less expected to have: a gentle mist to assist the emotional response of visitors and drug them into a torpor of sympathy. Not garment-rending sympathy, but something more dignified. A mood was delivered via fog. Discreetly, and mildly, with micro-doses misting through carefully arranged spouts, the way an outdoor mall in the summer might be air-conditioned. You didn’t see it and you didn’t smell it. You strolled through a field or a plaza or a series of dark marble tunnels, whatever, sipping the sorrow-laced air, and, when you finally departed, a kind of low-grade catharsis had been triggered. You were bursting with feeling. Big artistic win.

It was sponsorship and it was gross, but because it was essentially invisible, and because people genuinely seemed to seek it out—attendance had undeniably spiked—Roy and Ida had been looking the other way and letting it happen, and now they really didn’t have a choice. It was an inevitable shortcut, or even a stage of evolution, in architecture, assisting the public’s reaction and securing that most prized of currencies: human fucking feeling. How to create it, how to create it? And why not use all the help you could get?

But here was Roy saying that he didn’t want to agree to anything yet, and fuck these companies for trying to leverage a sacred memorial with their God-damned money. “Maybe we only consent to a zoned dispensary this time,” he said. “There should be an area, cordoned off, where the feelings are more intense.”

“Intense how?”

“Like, harder, more honest.”

“Oh, some feelings aren’t honest?”

“None of them are, Ida. It’s fake, right? It’s a drug spout in the ground. Or it’s a gas stream pulsing from the ass of a mechanical bird flying a figure eight around the fucking burial ground. Isn’t that the idea, that we can’t make people feel exactly what we want with our structures, so we fucking poison them instead?”

“Poison.”

“Sure, it’s poison. In high enough doses.”

“Like water, then. Like oxygen.”

“Exactly like water and oxygen. A perfect comparison. You just read my mind.”

“I couldn’t help it. The door to your face was open and the text was scrolling inside. Impossible to miss.”

Roy shook his head. “On the other hand, why not put people in a more pensive or reflective state? Why not even stoke their anger a bit?”

“Because those are the moods they bring to us. Those are the moods we correct.”

“O.K., do you hear how that sounds, Ida? We correct their feelings? Really?”

“You make that sound dirty.”

“I guess I’m not sure why we’re even arguing about this,” Roy said. He sounded defeated. “I don’t think the ingredients are within our purview. I don’t think we can edit those parameters.”

“Not with chemicals, we can’t,” Ida said.

“Meaning?”

“Look, I don’t care how happy or blissed-out or in touch with the one true good earth you are, if you walk into a certain space, situated on a certain site, and that space has been shaped to the nth fucking degree, your mood, if we want it to, will freaking collapse like a lung.”

Roy smiled at her. He raised an empty hand in a toast. Such a small and delicate hand. “Cheers,” he said, and he softly pawed the air.

After they won the bid, with a forty-eighth-iteration proposal that was mildly tolerated by all—a black granite labyrinth, inset with dark transparencies, as if panels of the stone itself were made of glass, which, however badass that would have been, they weren’t—Roy went out to St. Louis. Roy was the face, the body, the organism. Maybe he had sweet young people he fucked; Ida couldn’t be sure. He caught the temperature of the place and tried to decode the deeper desires of the city, which could then be met or thwarted so that the appropriate tension might infuse the final project. He photo-documented and did flyovers and he stuck his finger into the client’s collective rotten body to determine where the hard command center was. These kinds of projects often blew up in your face. You were fired while you slept. So Roy, with his temper and his charm and his perfect little body, stayed out there and fought like a mongrel to keep them in the game.

Ida spent that time at the drafting table, sketching mostly, working from the gut, ignoring what she knew in order to make way for what interested her far more—what she didn’t know. For instance, she knew that she felt tremendous sorrow for the dead and thought about them often, if vaguely. What she didn’t know was why she wasn’t crippled with grief, stupefied at the scale of the atrocity, unable to move or speak. This was a mystery.

She wanted to draw a purely empty space, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Heavy lines were required, of all things, and not just for framing the so-called void, as people in her profession loved to say, but for actual fucking substance. She had to ready the space for haunting. Purity was called for. This was a tombstone for a city, a funeral for a feeling of safety that was now gone. Leaving a blank page was not the same thing. That was a cop-out, and, anyway, you couldn’t shit on the client that way. Partly because she herself was the client, and Roy was the client, and so was everyone they knew, and everyone they didn’t. Now you had to view the world, the air itself, as something that could be torn away to reveal an eerier sort of place. Maybe that sounded like bullshit, but sometimes, sometimes, this process—if followed strictly and without concern for hovering meddlers—led to a wild, unstable kind of vacuum that you were not always prepared to be sucked into, Ida thought, even if you were curious, even if you felt you couldn’t be shocked.

That was what she tried to draw, and that was ideally what she and Roy tried to build, even though “build” was a strange word, and you sounded like a punk if you said “erase,” or something pretentious like that. Like, in my work, I erase the landscape in order to reveal the true terrain of the world. Yeah, uh, no. Maybe it didn’t make sense, none of it, but it didn’t have to. Sometimes it just had to sort of look pretty and make you sad and thoughtful. That was Memorial Theory 101. In the end, no one cared what you thought, or said, about a memorial you made. That sort of verbal posturing was for students and the simperingly boneless teachers who floated over them, gushing endless praise out of their open necks.

Roy phoned from St. Louis, early in the process, and even though a working design had been approved, the understanding—Ida’s understanding, anyway—was that certain, uh, changes could still be made, and these changes could, caveat, significantly alter and enhance and improve the original, shit-sucking plan, which she suddenly thought might belong, in miniature, on the wall of a Starbucks.

What Ida envisioned, she told Roy, was a series of soft columns swelling out of the plaza, but almost imperceptibly. You almost wouldn’t even know they were there.

“You know how there are some people who think that if they could only sharpen their vision they would see ghosts?” Ida asked.

“I didn’t know that,” Roy said. “Interesting.”

The plaza itself, Ida went on, would be poured from a spongy material, so that visitors might feel as though they were sinking as they walked along. Playground rubber, maybe? The columns would be slablike but ephemeral—Ida emphasized this word: “You know, very nearly not there,” she told him—fabricated out of a kind of stable, nearly elastic, she didn’t know how else to put it, smoke.

“You can admire them as sculpture—they will be beautiful, and up close the smoke will reveal a texture, sort of like porcelain, with streaks and veins and imperfections in the surface. But, from farther away, they may just look like clouds. Rogue clouds that have fallen or just got too low to the ground.”

Roy was quiet for a while. She thought she could hear him typing. “That sounds nice,” he finally said. “Aside from wondering how this remotely relates to the approved plan, am I supposed to be asking how you’ll achieve this?”

“Other than the obvious way?”

Roy was rummaging at the other end of the line. Talking to someone or watching TV. Ida listened into the room and listened and listened, on the verge of hearing something clear. Maybe he was falling from an airplane. She wasn’t even kidding. There was so much wind around him.

“I mean, how serious are you?” he said. “This sounds maybe more speculative? Which is cool. Which is, you know, I know it’s part of your process, but I’m living in reality right now. I’m in an actual hotel room. In the actual real world. I’m talking to the board, or, really, they’re talking to me, very sternly—they are literally holding my hand like I’m a child—and I’m talking to the mayor and the city and the state, and in my downtime I am fucking having elevator sex with the donors, who are huge hairy creatures with indeterminate genitalia, because they get to have whatever little thing they want from me.”

“How nice for you.”

“I don’t have a choice, Ida. Seriously, how possible is this, your sticky smoke? Are we really spitballing this idea right now, at this fucking late date? Am I supposed to be telling people that this is what we are doing?”

“Well, whatever you do, please don’t refer to it as sticky smoke. It sounds like a carnival attraction. With a little bit of work, we can find some seductive language. That’s never so hard.”

She wanted to laugh. Never so hard. It was the hardest thing in the world. There wouldn’t be language for this. Not in her lifetime.

“Jesus, Ida. The tech—and you fucking know this very well—doesn’t allow for what you’re talking about. I mean, right? Suddenly I’m the bad guy because of physics?”

Ida sighed. “That’s not why you’re the bad guy, Roy.”

They covered other topics, because they had a stupid business to run, and so many details to haggle over—zoning and permissions and negotiations with contractors, along with political tensions that Ida couldn’t even fathom—and then, just as they were saying good night, Ida said she needed to ask him a question.

Roy was still distracted; he would always be. Some muscle in his face produced the word “yeah,” but otherwise nobody was home. After finding out what he needed to know from Ida, he’d moved on to gather information from other sources. This was Roy spreading himself so thin that you could see through him. At least in person he knew to tilt his face into postures of interest, taming his little mannequin body. So Ida was silent for a while. She heard the same dull murmur in the background. A voice or a bird or the wind, or just some subvocal turbulence on the phone line. It was almost pretty.

“What?” Roy said, suddenly impatient. “What do you want to ask me?”

“I just wanted to know . . . who’s that with you?”

“What?”

“Next to you, Roy. Just look. In the bed. Touching you while you talk. What a curious creature. Who is that? I’d really like to know.”

As she said this, she pictured someone, something, crawling over her husband’s body. The most gorgeous living thing.

Roy said nothing. Maybe he turned off the television, or maybe something else caused a rapid drop in room tone, because now the sheer silence was staggering. It was shocking to Ida. Like you’d need a machine to achieve that kind of quiet. The world had been scrubbed of noise, just because she’d said a bunch of words. That was what a spell was, maybe. Had a mere sentence of hers ever had such an effect before? She could hear Roy breathe; she could hear the churn of his body.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ida.”

It wasn’t like she expected a different answer, or particularly cared. Confessions and denials were equally troubling. Answers in general were so often disappointing. Was there any speech at all that didn’t, in the end, cause a little bit of dejection?

“No, I guess you don’t,” she said.

“I mean, if I could show you, I would.”

“Show me, Roy. Switch over to video. Show me the room and the closets and the hallway. That’d be great. Thanks.”

“Uh, O.K. I’ll have to call you back. I’ll call you back.”

She laughed out loud, but it came out a little bit off, like a shout.

“Good night, Roy,” she said. “Sleep well.” And she hung up.

The apartment was cold and she couldn’t wait to crawl under the covers. “Oh, and by the way,” Ida said to no one, as she readied herself for bed. “You can bleed smoke into a clear skin, no problem.” She laughed softly. It was not as strange as it might have been to be talking out loud to herself. “You’d want to use a large-field polymer, of course. Totally transparent and ridiculously thin. I guess it’s a kind of windowpane balloon, in a way, but its contours can be fixed nonspherically, which gives it any shape you want, including tufts and wisps and whatnot, like a cloud. A sort of scientific version of a balloon animal. Low-tech, really. And what you get is a shape made of smoke with the barest hint of skin—a person, a column, a cloud, anything. You could even make a maze, and fill the walls of the maze with dark black smoke.

“So, yeah,” she whispered, turning out the light in her empty apartment. “That’s how you’d do it, if you were to do it. The physics aren’t an issue. But, honestly, I’m not sure anymore that that’s the way to go.”

It was late and she was very tired. She could hardly even hear herself, as she started to fall asleep.

“I just can’t honestly say that it’s the right idea for this particular project.”

When Roy came back from St. Louis he didn’t come home. Ida wouldn’t have minded seeing him, to shake hands maybe, to perform some soft footwork that might approximate closure, but Roy had apparently made his decision, and soon some sweethearts from the office came for his things, operating with a list, leaving behind only an old pair of shoes. The transaction was either respectfully nonverbal, Ida thought, or calmly hostile. Was there much of a difference? It was interesting when a set of feelings went so unspoken for so long that they drifted into the unknown. Did they expire or fester? Maybe one day she’d find out.

Construction was under way on the memorial, and the opening wasn’t that far off, but rather than hover in St. Louis and fret, micromanaging the development of their sorrowful mall, as she’d started to think of it, Ida stayed in Chicago and took walks along the lake. More often than not, she ended up in one of the older graveyards of the city. For research, she told herself. She had no family dead in these places, no one to mourn. Everyone she grieved for these days was unknown to her, which made her grief seem more like self-pity. Was that true of all grief? Who the fuck knew. She toured the marked paths and cut across the grass when she could, because that was where you could start to feel something, however fleeting. Sometimes there were woods to traverse, and then she’d burst out into a patch of graves on the other side. More dead to consider. Folks who died long before she was born. Cemetery design had not changed in some time. The aesthetic was pretty resilient. Maybe it wasn’t an aesthetic. Just an instinct for shelter. She marvelled at the sight lines, at the effortlessly endless rows of dead, each name, each life, hollowed out in space.

Of course it was too late. You couldn’t simply plant grass in St. Louis and design the simplest of headstones. There were too many dead. A technical problem. But a headstone could shrivel into a narrow granite pin, with a name inscribed vertically. Didn’t that solve the issue? Of course it didn’t, because no one even knew what the issue was. And, whatever slick and welcoming thing she and Roy built for the plaza, there would still be a graveyard beneath it, the way there is a graveyard beneath everything. It would just take generations of people to find it, clawing down into the earth year after year until they touched stone.

A fog of birds passed over the Eberlee Plaza in St. Louis on the morning the memorial opened.

Ida sat at some distance from the ceremony. Roy had said that she was, of course, expected to be there, and here she was, alone on a bench with a perfect view of what she had wrought.

The birds didn’t go away. They swished and darted and soon struck a steady, gliding orbit over the plaza, a kind of dark and clotted halo, like barbed wire in the air. Had they come for the sweet sedatives that were no doubt pumping into the area from underground cylinders? Would the dosage be too strong for a bird, and was there any concern about this? Was anyone in charge of the most basic shit?

Ida sat, by chance, just across from the long, snaking plywood wall of the missing. The weather over the past two years had done a job on the wall. It was mostly stripped of posters by now. The remaining posters were scarred and wind-bleached and almost impossible to decipher. On a few, the photos had eroded but the text had endured, so there were blank sheets that simply said “Missing,” with nothing below, as if it were the white space itself that had vanished and could no longer be found.

When the ceremony began, she saw Roy. He looked good. Half the size of the large, sweaty men who surrounded him, as if he were a child encircled by monsters. He was shaking hands, talking, laughing, and several times, as Ida watched from the bench, she saw Roy applauding vigorously, even though no one, as far as she could see, was speaking or performing. It was just her husband, alone in the square, clapping his hands as hard as he could.

Mostly Ida watched the birds, which seemed bizarrely determined, almost angry, certain of something that she would never know. There was a theory of bird vision that came to mind: that birds saw the world through a grid, bisected down to the finest detail. Not a mosaic so much as a shattered image, with white tracers boiling in the spaces in between, or so Ida imagined, so that all the bird really saw was a kind of luminescent netting. Aglow or afire or whatever. No need to poeticize it, but still. Sort of hard not to. You didn’t see the mouse, if you were a bird, but a mouse-shaped mesh of light that contained it. She was butchering the science, she knew, but this was the general idea. A kind of shining wire bag we’re all trapped in, which might explain some shit, right? Or, Ida thought, deepen the mystery. It was a structural view of space, and it treated objects as an afterthought. Objects described the light, not the other way around. Yes, it was speculative, since, what the fuck, it posited the sensory experience of a God-damned bird, but it seemed to have been endorsed by some of the more distinguished eggheads from expensive, self-regarding universities. One particular scientist claimed that this bird vision revealed the true, unmediated world, something that we humans couldn’t handle. We humans! Ida thought. Us! Is there anything we can handle? Our desire for sense and order, our sentimental belief that we are not hurtling through space in tiny pieces, has served as a kind of biological propaganda for our visual apparatus, leading to the sentimentalized, so-called whole world on view in front of us.

In other words, fear, and more fear, and, yeah. Wouldn’t there one day, just by chance, Ida thought, be a little person who came along and didn’t feel afraid? Someone who saw this world of speeding pieces just as it was? Wasn’t that bound to happen, and what on earth, she thought, as she watched everyone walking past her into the mirage, was taking so long? ♦